Recent theoretical work in developmental psychology suggests that humans are predisposed to align their mental states with those of other individuals. One way this manifests is in cooperative communication ; that is, intentional communication aimed at aligning individuals’ mental states with respect to events in their shared environment. This idea has received strong empirical support. The purpose of this paper is to extend this account by proposing an integrative model of the biobehavioral dynamics of cooperative communication. Our formulation is based (...) on active inference. Active inference suggests that action-perception cycles operate to minimize uncertainty and optimize an individual’s internal model of the world. We propose that humans are characterized by an evolved adaptive prior belief that their mental states are aligned with, or similar to, those of conspecifics (i.e., that ‘we are the same sort of creature, inhabiting the same sort of niche’). The use of cooperative communication emerges as the principal means to gather evidence for this belief, allowing for the development of a shared narrative that is used to disambiguate interactants’ (hidden and inferred) mental states. Thus, by using cooperative communication, individuals effectively attune to a hermeneutic niche composed, in part, of others’ mental states; and, reciprocally, attune the niche to their own ends via epistemic niche construction. This means that niche construction enables features of the niche to encode precise, reliable cues about the deontic or shared value of certain action policies (e.g., the utility of using communicative constructions to disambiguate mental states, given expectations about shared prior beliefs). In turn, the alignment of mental states (prior beliefs) enables the emergence of a novel, contextualizing scale of cultural dynamics that encompasses the actions and mental states of the ensemble of interactants and their shared environment. The dynamics of this contextualizing layer of cultural organization feedback, across scales, to constrain the variability of the prior expectations of the individuals who constitute it. Our theory additionally builds upon the active inference literature by introducing a new set of neurobiologically plausible computational hypotheses for cooperative communication. We conclude with directions for future research. (shrink)

Through cultural transmission, repeated learning by new individuals transforms cultural information, which tends to become increasingly compressible . Existing diffusion chain studies include in their design two processes that could be responsible for this tendency: learning and reproducing . This paper manipulates the presence of learning in a simple iterated drawing design experiment. We find that learning seems to be the causal factor behind the increase in compressibility observed in the transmitted information, while reproducing is a source of random heritable (...) innovations. Only a theory invoking these two aspects of cultural learning will be able to explain human culture's fundamental balance between stability and innovation. (shrink)

Studies of language evolution in the lab have used the iterated learning paradigm to show how linguistic structure emerges through cultural transmission—repeated cycles of learning and use across generations of speakers. However, agent-based simulations suggest that prior biases crucially impact the outcome of cultural transmission. Here, we explored this notion through an iterated learning study of English-French bilingual adults (mostly sequential bilinguals dominant in English). Each participant learned two unstructured artificial languages in a counterbalanced fashion, one resembling English, another resembling (...) French at the phono-orthographic level. The output of each participant was passed down to the next participant, forming diffusion chains of 10 generations per language. We hypothesized that artificial languages would become easier to learn and exhibit greater structure when they were aligned with participants’ bilingual experience (i.e., English languages being easier to learn overall), or as a function of practice (i.e., languages learned second being easier to learn overall). Instead, we found that English-like languages became more structured over generations, but only when they were learned first. In contrast, French-like languages became more structured regardless of the order of learning, suggesting the presence of an asymmetric switch cost during artificial language learning. Moreover, individual differences in language usage modulated the amount of structure produced by the participants. Overall, these data suggest that bilingual experience impacts how novel languages are learned at an individual level, which can then scale up to cultural transmission of novel language at a group level. (shrink)

Natural languages vary widely in the degree to which they make use of nested compositional structure in their grammars. It has long been noted by linguists that the languages historically spoken in small communities develop much deeper levels of compositional embedding than those spoken by larger groups. Recently, this observation has been confirmed by a robust statistical analysis of the World Atlas of Language Structures. In order to examine this connection mechanistically, we propose an agent‐based model that accounts for key (...) cultural evolutionary features of language transfer and language change. We identify transitivity as a physical parameter of social networks critical for the evolution of compositional structure and the hierarchical patterning of scale‐free distributions as inhibitory. (shrink)

Languages spoken in larger populations are relatively simple. A possible explanation for this is that languages with a greater number of speakers tend to also be those with higher proportions of non‐native speakers, who may simplify language during learning. We assess this explanation for the negative correlation between population size and linguistic complexity in three experiments, using artificial language learning techniques to investigate both the simplifications made by individual adult learners and the potential for such simplifications to influence group‐level language (...) characteristics. In Experiment 1, we show that individual adult learners trained on a morphologically complex miniature language simplify its morphology. In Experiment 2, we explore how these simplifications may then propagate through subsequent learning. We use the languages produced by the participants of Experiment 1 as the input for a second set of learners, manipulating (a) the proportion of their input which is simplified and (b) the number of speakers they receive their input from. We find, contrary to expectations, that mixing the input from multiple speakers nullifies the simplifications introduced by individuals in Experiment 1; simplifications at the individual level do not result in simplification of the population's language. In Experiment 3, we focus on language use as a mechanism for simplification, exploring the consequences of the interaction between individuals differing in their linguistic competence (as native and non‐native speakers might). We find that speakers who acquire a more complex language than their partner simplify their language during interaction. We ultimately conclude that adult learning can result in languages spoken by more people having simpler morphology, but that idiosyncratic simplifications by non‐natives do not offer a complete explanation in themselves; accommodation—by comparatively competent non‐natives to less competent speakers, or by native speakers to non‐natives—may be a key linking mechanism. (shrink)

Language maps signals onto meanings through the use of two distinct types of structure. First, the space of meanings is discretized into categories that are shared by all users of the language. Second, the signals employed by the language are compositional: The meaning of the whole is a function of its parts and the way in which those parts are combined. In three iterated learning experiments using a vast, continuous, open-ended meaning space, we explore the conditions under which both structured (...) categories and structured signals emerge ex nihilo. While previous experiments have been limited to either categorical structure in meanings or compositional structure in signals, these experiments demonstrate that when the meaning space lacks clear preexisting boundaries, more subtle morphological structure that lacks straightforward compositionality—as found in natural languages—may evolve as a solution to joint pressures from learning and communication. (shrink)